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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27269677">in your shadow found home many a lost soul</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bulut/pseuds/bulut'>bulut</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Haikyuu!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Drabble Sequence, Fluff, Introspection, Kozume Kenma &amp; Kuroo Tetsurou Friendship, M/M, Sappy, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 02:42:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,166</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27269677</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bulut/pseuds/bulut</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Bokuto Koutarou isn't the sun or a stray star.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bokuto Koutarou/Kozume Kenma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>in your shadow found home many a lost soul</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>s4e17 wadded me up into a ball and spiked me straight into kenma lovers hell.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>It’s a rainy day, he’s by the front porch of the gym building waiting for Kuroo to come out, and he hears a cheerful voice boom, much in contrast with how he feels.</p><p>“Here, have this! Don’t get wet on your way back!”</p><p>The tall, stocky owner of the voice gracelessly shoves an umbrella into his joined hands, flashing him a smile before going whistling, skipping on his merry way.</p><p>He doesn’t know yet, but he’s just met who will become the most important person in his life.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Tetsurou immediately recognises the cutesy owl pattern on the umbrella as belonging to one of his friends from another high school’s volleyball club.</p><p>“Where’d you get Bokuto’s umbrella?” he asks, and Kenma can hope never to face the kind stranger ever again, but life has other plans for him, plans in direct conflict with his best interests, over and over again.</p><p>Dried off and in a clear white plastic bag, the umbrella finds its way back to its owner, but it also takes something from Kenma with it, rudely, impudently, without asking.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Nekoma was a mistake.</p><p>Having Tetsurou fully privy to his schedule and his clubless status is as much of a bother as he’s always imagined it to be. Attending the same institute officially renders Tetsurou his upperclassman, and has Tetsurou always sounded this grown-up and father-like when he talked to Kenma about life experiences and making friends?</p><p>He occupies a persistent, never-quiet voice at the back of Kenma’s head and an unsolicited, unyielding spot in Kenma’s heart. Refusing to comply and retorting on autopilot feel less like actions without consequences and more like needles through Tetsurou’s heart when he does them as Tetsurou’s underclassman and teammate.</p><p>Playing setter like he’d come to through the years, sharing the same red-black uniform as his first and best friend, and enduring the teenager sweat stench in the clubroom it is, then.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Bokuto of the owl patterned umbrella is Fukuroudani’s star player, feared by many a scrawny high school spiker, has cotton filling his skull. An entire team has formed around him to make up for the lack of substance in this critical space.</p><p>He’s loud, laughter-happy, always emitting joy, always radiating light; Kenma might go blind.</p><p>He doesn’t remember the silent shadow he offered his umbrella to without expecting return once, but—</p><p>Has Kenma been expecting him to remember?</p><p>Why?</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Turns out he can lose sleep over something other than video games.</p><p>The vices of infatuation grip and crush his insides the way fear or grief would. There are daydreams, fantasies of the unusually tactile kind; he can swear the hand encompassing his is more than just a scrap of his imagination, but he’s as alone as ever in his bed.</p><p>The tentacles of jealousy can traverse light-years and catch him in another universe, the previously untouched space of his dreams. The spotlight falls upon Akaashi Keiji, a loved and cherished man, the unwilling recipient of attention Kenma would gladly replace him to receive.</p><p>And maybe exactly because how alienated he must already be from himself, all invested and interested and into life like he’s never been before, the thought doesn’t startle him into action, but sits there at the centre of his mind instead. The ivy branches of sleep climb higher over and around it.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>The first time he’s alone in a room with Bokuto Koutarou, well, he can’t remember it in detail.</p><p>It’s a rainy day just like another one in another lifetime, though, and that backdrop holds enough memories in it that he can tell some of the specifics:</p><p>Bokuto came under his owl umbrella,</p><p>Akaashi isn’t there and he’s way more smug about it than what is reasonable,</p><p>When Bokuto asks him about the unremarkable details of his boring life in such an affectionate voice, he doesn’t know whether to smile at the attention he finally receives or to cry at how much of an older brother, and not very much of a boyfriend, Bokuto acts like.</p><p>Most of all, he’s angry at himself for getting cooped up in such juvenile emotions.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>He would compromise not much later, that these are not juvenile emotions he finds himself in, or rather, that he’s not to be blamed for finding himself in them, because seeking warmth and wanting to share happiness with someone aren’t things only children are allowed to do.</p><p>His best friend might be putting too much faith in his “I don’t like hot-blooded people,” from years ago, but he <em>is </em>dying to ask if Kenma has an exception to that rule in mind, Kenma can see.</p><p>Kenma publicises that piece of coveted information when he seeks out and meets Bokuto of his own accord, on his on initiative, without any kind of prompting from Tetsurou, devoid of Akaashi’s pacifying presence, and Tetsurou is going insane, okay, now he’s speeding into annoying territory with so much overreacting, but Kenma can’t find it in him to get irritated when Tetsurou resembles a fawning mother so much.</p><p>So many good things in his life are thanks to Tetsurou, after all.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Getting some truths through Koutarou’s head is, as expected, an endeavour.</p><p>Though now that Akaashi Keiji isn’t enemy, and the path to love isn’t a level he has to clear on nothing but a stickly branch in hand as weapon, things are looking up.</p><p>They go on many first dates (or, more precisely, stay at home for many first dates) before Koutarou realises that’s what they do, and oh my God, Kenma, is that what we’ve been doing, I could’ve been kissing you all this time instead of gazing longingly into your showing roots, but Koutarou, you didn’t realise your gaze was longing when you were doing it, and.</p><p>It is so much like them.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Intimacy has to be built towards before it becomes a comfortable sphere to exist in, but Koutarou’s arms were made for embracing, his eyes the gentle gleams of fireflies, and none of Kenma’s guards stay up in the face of so much gentle charm.</p><p>Bokuto Koutarou isn’t the sun or a stray star. He doesn’t pull any unsuspecting planets or meteors into his orbit. He knows how to let go, is confident in his knowledge that those who want to will stay anyway, and the ones worth his love are those ones that stay.</p><p>And maybe Kenma is not good with his words, close-fisted with his actions, and all of these thoughts are mostly the ones no one could catch him articulating even in his most vulnerable state of sleep, but they reside here, right here in his heart, and the ones who are meant to know, they feel it. They see it.</p><p>When he puts his arms around Koutarou, and when his head is level with his heart, he can place his lips over it and whisper them right into the depths of it.</p><p> </p><p>~</p><p> </p><p>Kenma’s best and worst mistakes are one in the same.</p><p>They’re black and gold, streaked with white.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i hope you're not tired of seeing this at the end of everything i write, but... english is not my first language... possible mistakes.</p><p>thank you for reading.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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